Christine Ohuruogu was once the face of London 2012, but these days the 400m runner is happier keeping out of the limelight. The only defending Olympic champion expected to be on the British athletics team, the 27-year-old has been noticeably low-key in the build up to the Games, taking part in relatively few advertising campaigns, turning down interviews and resisting the lure of signing up for a lucrative newspaper column.
The east Londoner says her approach is informed by past mistakes. It was in 2009, following a string of victories – successive gold medals three years running at the Commonwealth Games in 2006, the World Championships in 2007 and the Olympic Games in 2008 – that Ohuruogu first began to struggle. She agrees now that it was a watershed moment, the realisation that what she did off the track had a huge effect on her performances on it. "I think so – 2009 made me realise that as quickly as you can get success it can disappear from your hands. I think from there I learned to focus on everything I've got and making sure I don't make that same mistake again."
While many of her British team-mates are now cashing in on the attention and financial benefits of being an athlete at a home Olympic Games, Ohuruogu – who refuses to think of herself as an Olympic champion – says she is happier waiting in the wings. "I'm really quiet, I don't really like …" Courting publicity? "Mmm. Some people are like that, I'm not one of those people, I prefer to be in the background and let my work speak for me," she says, speaking from Team GB's Aviva-funded camp in California. "It does mean I have to say no to a lot of things, but I'm just happy that I'm doing everything I can to put my training and my sport in the foreground."
After three miserable years – unable to defend her world title in 2009, injured in 2010 and for much of 2011, finally ending her season with a false start in the heats of the 400m at the world championships in Daegu – the very idea of Ohuruogu being able to defend her Olympic title in 2012 seemed far-fetched at best. But a storming individual run to help Britain win 4x400m relay gold at the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul this year turned heads and suddenly Ohuruogu was being feted by peers and rivals as the comeback queen. Even Charles van Commenee, not prone to hyperbole, says she is back to her best.
Ohuruogu, though, is reluctant to join in the chorus. "All this new noise about the Indoors, it doesn't really mean too much to me right now," she says. "For me I've always been here, doing what I'm doing. You guys will say you haven't seen me but in the last year – I know the season wasn't as I would have liked it to be, but I pushed right through the season, after Crystal Palace and then coming to the world champs, it was three weeks of intense training and we managed to turn things around.
"Obviously you didn't see that because of the disqualification in the worlds, but even though that happened I was satisfied that I'd done everything I could. So when people say it's a comeback it doesn't actually mean much to me at all."While she dismisses the notion of a comeback, she is disarmingly honest about the lows of false starting at the World Championships last year. Leaving the track she cut a distraught figure that day. "I think it was the shock at first," she says now. "I don't think I actually believed what was happening – it was very ironical that we'd done everything to turn it around and then when I had to perform I screwed it up. I think I was probably more upset with the fact that Lloyd [Cowan, her coach since 2002] had worked really really hard to get me into shape. We used every hour that we could in those three weeks, to try and make better the situation we had. I was very very upset for Lloyd really."